Generally, a driver monitoring apparatus photographs a driver that is driving a vehicle using a camera and decides a driving state (side glance, whether or not he/she drives the vehicle while being drowsy, a gaze point, or the like) of the driver through a photographed image of a face of the driver. In addition, the driver monitoring apparatus decides a driving state of the vehicle using a steering angle signal, a vehicle speed signal, and a driving position, and the like, of the vehicle that is being driven. In addition, the driver monitoring apparatus uses a driver state and the driving state to warn the driver that he/she is in an unstable driving state when he/she is in the unstable driving state, thereby making it possible to allow the driver to stably drive the vehicle. The driver monitoring apparatus includes an illuminator in order to smoothly photograph an image through the camera even at night or in an environment in which external light, or the like, is introduced.
Particularly, in the case in which lighting is irradiated over an entire region of the face when the driver monitoring apparatus tracks a gaze, a plurality of reflection points are formed by glasses, accessories, the face, and the like, and it is difficult to distinguish the plurality of reflection points and cornea reflection points from each other.
In addition, power of the illuminator needs to be increased in order to overcome the external light such as solar light, or the like. However, in this case, it is difficult to detect and track the face due to pixel saturation of a face region.
In a driver monitoring apparatus according to the related art, an angle and an irradiation angle of the illumination are fixed. Even in the case of using an illuminator that may be adjusted, the use of the illuminator is limited to the case in which a size of an irradiation region is constant and a specific region (for example, an eye region) in the face is tracked and is irradiated with light, as disclosed in EP 2371271 A1.